While traditional elegies focus on memorializing the person who has died,often expressing professional appreciation of the subject's work or deeds,confessional elegies offer emotional, highly personal accounts of loss andgrief concerned less with the life of the one who is gone and more withthe pain of the one left behind. Poets such as Robert Frost, RobertLowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Bishopproduced elegies to friends, family members, and fellow artists that dealtwith the experience of grief that accompanies death. I am seeking papersthat examine confessional elegies and how they fit within the largertraditions of the elegy and American poetry.

Submit abstracts of 250-300 words to slpeters_at_tamu.edu by January 19, 2006.